How Star Wars Battlefront has changed since the beta

Even though the game doesn’t release until this week, a shocking number of people have already played it, the beta pulling in roughly 9 million players, the largest beta in publisher EA’s history. But the beta certainly wasn’t perfect, and EA has finally opened up about the changes developer DICE made to the game in response to all the feedback.

According to Star Wars Battlefront Community Manager Mathew Everett, the majority of the changes have come in the form of balancing, adjusting spawns,, and tweaking the party system.

“To make your fights as fun and fair as possible, several tweaks to vehicles and weapons have been made,” Everett explained. “The Cycler Rifle, for instance, has been balanced with bullet drop and slower projectile speed for more deserving kills.”

As for vehicles, “Walkers should be mighty – but not invincible – so weak spots have been added to the AT-AT and AT-ST vehicles. Furthermore, damage balancing is vital for a fair game, and we’ve tweaked this balance for how vehicles, troopers, Star Cards, and ion weapons stand up against each other.”

In a similar way, the game’s hero characters have been changed. “Playing as Luke Skywalker, [or] Darth Vader… is something we want to feel truly special, and to achieve this we’ve made several tweaks. Two things we decided to remove were the automatic damage done to heroes over time, and the ability of getting health back when killing enemies. Ultimately, we think this will perfect the power fantasy of playing as these characters.”

In the beta, spawn camping was an unfortunately common complaint. Speaking specifically of Hoth, “We’ve added combat areas that are different for Rebels and Imperials to mitigate spawn camping, and the spawn distances for the two teams have been adjusted on the first uplink.”

And finally, when it comes to playing with your friends, it should be “as easy and smooth as possible, and we’ve done several tweaks in this area. For instance, it will be possible to join a friend via the Xbox Friends app, and you’ll also be able to see your party friends in-game (look for green dots on the map) – but you cannot spawn on them.”

This all comes along with a day one patch meant to address a handful of bugs and performance issues.

In the ramp up to the game’s launch tomorrow, November 17th, we recently learned everything that would come with Star War’s Battlefront’s $50 season pass and saw a full list of the game’s weapons and star cards. Will you be grabbing Star Wars Battlefront this week? Or are you like one of our editors, Alex Connellan, and thing the game is doomed too fail under the high expectations? Let us know in comments.

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